on the efficacy of our petitionary prayers

Islam, christianity and judaism have been called abrahamic religions in so far as their followers worship the god of abraham. it seems crucial for our concerns regarding the questions which have been raised in philosophy of religion and even theology to know who is the god which abraham worships. there is a common story in all of the sacred texts of these religions, namely the story of sodom and lot’s people that i want to focus on and through which to shed light on some of the attributes of abraham’s god. during the story we can see two main themes. first, abraham starts challenging god’s decision to destroy sodom, and second, abraham pleas for their forgiveness. i shall try to argue that first, abraham thinks that god’s decisions can be changed, and second, that our human implications and praying can affect god’s decisions. based on these conceptualizations about god i shall conclude that god of abraham is active in the world but his activity is to some extent related to our free actions and decisions.while i think that the several arguments against the doctrine of divine immutability are cogent however in this paper i tried to argue in favor of another argument. call this the argument from the efficacy of prayers: god commands us to pray and he has promised that pray unto me and i will answer your prayer” (q 40:60), (jer 29:12). we faithfully pray god for our needs. if our petitionary prayers are efficacious i.e. in virtue of our prayer god acts in the world and brings about a specific state of affairs, then god is not impassible since he has been affected by our prayers. if god is not impassible then he is not immutable.this was the argument i tried in this paper to argue for. however, one may deny that our petitionary prayers are efficacious in that sense which i defended. i think she eventually can show that our world is a good world in which we falsely believe that god may accept our prayer and change the world sometimes upon our requests but she cannot show that god doesn’t deceive us when he promised that he will answer our prayers. contrary to her view i think that god honestly promised us to accept our prayer and he will do his best to accept them. of course many of them are immoral, or perhaps requires some bad consequences to others which god, the most benevolent cannot accept their actualizations